Mobile Twitter Gets New Design

What is blue, lives in your phone browser and has something in common with your friendly neighborhood nomadic cobbler? Twitter for Web for mobile devices (a.k.a Mobile Twitter) it is. No one really notices them until you’re in a pinch.

With the vast array of mobile Twitter clients available for mobile devices nowadays, hardly anyone uses Twitter for web, at least not until your multi-core battery-chugging device runs out of juice and you have to fall back to your long-neglected feature phone’s browser. Now, that’s where Twitter for web comes in.

Log on to mobile.twitter.com and the first thing you’ll notice is that Twitter has ditched the former, mostly blue background for good old white with splashes of blue and grey on top and yellow below on the Sign In page. This uncluttered interface goes to show that plain doesn’t necessarily mean less eye-catching.

The same less-is-more design reigns throughout the entire site. The grey row on top houses the icons for Home, Mentions, Trends, Profile and Compose Tweet respectively with Search and Refresh lurking just above them. The use of highly recognizable icons instead of text does help with the aesthetics and to saves screen real estate.

Clicking on a person’s handle takes you to their profile where you can see the usual info from their tweet count to the number of people they follow, their timeline and so on. Your typical gossip shortcuts: Reply, Retweet and Favorite Tweet are still there embedded in every tweet. The guys at Twitter haven’t changed much here, just made it tidier.

Seeing as it is not a meant to be a full-featured Twitter client, you won’t find all the bells and whistles that third-party apps provide but Twitter for web does manage to churn out your timeline as well as provide buttons and links at the bottom to load older tweets, change settings, get Help, turn images off and most importantly, sign out when you’re done.

All in all, there isn’t any major upgrade to report here and Twitter for web still has it shortcomings. For example, clicking on an avatar will return you to the person’s profile instead of enlarging said avatar. Image thumbnails are also not supported.

However, it’s good to see that the folks at Twitter aren’t resting on their oars to provide a good online experience for anyone who logs in on the site irrespective of device.